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Rhubarb Pudding
4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 4 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 eggs 1 lemon ½ cupful flour 1 cupful stewed rhubarb 1/2 teaspoonful salt Few breadcrumbs Crisco a pudding dish and dust it over with breadcrumbs. Put layer of breadcrumbs at bottom, then spread in rhubarb. Beat Crisco and sugar till creamy, beat in yolks of eggs, add grated rind of lemon, sift in flour and salt. Spread this mixture over rhubarb and bake in moderate oven twenty minutes. Beat up whites of eggs to stiff froth, add one tablespoonful of sifted sugar and half teaspoonful lemon juice. Drop in spoonfuls on top of pudding and return to oven to brown lightly, ½ cupful Crisco ½ cupful grated cheese 6 tablespoonfuls rice 1 can tomatoes
A creamed sponge baked over stewed rhubarb and finished with meringue. The method is sound, but the ingredient list has some gaps and the page carries stray text from the recipe that follows.
- Ignore the last line"1½ cupful Crisco, 1½ cupful grated cheese, 6 tablespoonfuls rice, 1 can tomatoes" is not part of the pudding; it appears to be the ingredient list of another recipe run on to this page. It has nothing to do with the pudding.
- Moderate oven350F. Twenty minutes will set a thin layer of batter; if your dish is deep and the topping more than about half an inch thick, give it 30-35 minutes and test with a skewer before the meringue goes on.
- CriscoHydrogenated all-vegetable shortening, launched two years before this book and the reason the book exists. Modern Crisco is reformulated to remove trans fats but behaves much the same in creaming. Butter works and tastes better here; the book calls for Crisco because it was written to sell it.
- The batter needs liquidFour tablespoons of fat, four of sugar, two yolks and 1½ cups of flour will not spread, and no leavening is listed. Add 4-6 tablespoons of milk or water and a teaspoon of baking powder, or the topping bakes as a dry biscuit lid rather than a sponge.
- MeasuresFour tablespoonfuls is a quarter cup. Period tablespoons may have run slightly larger than the modern 15 ml, but not enough to matter in a pudding.
- The rhubarbStew it down thick and sweeten it before it goes in the dish; a cup of loose, watery rhubarb will steam the batter from below. Rhubarb varies wildly in acidity, so taste it. Only the stalks are used; rhubarb leaves are toxic and are never cooked.
- The meringueTwo whites with one tablespoon of sugar is a very lean meringue and will weep quickly. Two tablespoons per white holds better. Return it to the 350F oven for 8-12 minutes, until the peaks are pale gold.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs, not fresh. They line the greased dish and soak up rhubarb juice so the base does not flood.
- YieldFour to six servings from a 1½-quart dish. Best warm, the day it is baked; the meringue collapses in the refrigerator.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, two years after the company put hydrogenated cottonseed oil on the market as a shortening that was neither lard nor butter. That selling point -- a fat with no animal origin -- was one the company pressed with vegetarian and kosher households, and with cooks who distrusted the summer keeping qualities of butter. The pudding itself is an old English form, a creamed sponge baked over stewed fruit, the sort of thing that in earlier books was made with butter or suet. Rhubarb was a natural choice for a promotional cookbook: it was widely grown in American kitchen gardens, known as pie plant, and reliably cheap in spring, when it was often the first thing to come out of the ground for the pastry board.